7 ms·

Don’t do this. Please don’t do this. The Wayback Machine is one of the only records of history we have on the internet, often the only way to look back and see

by maguay 7y ago

Don’t do this. Please don’t do this. The Wayback Machine is one of the only records of history we have on the internet, often the only way to look back and see what has been. It’s invaluable for that—and if your site is to be any part of the internet’s history, it should be available there too.

onetimemanytime 7y ago
There are MANY reasons to remove sites from there.
- gambiting 7y ago
  Ok, list a few then please.
  - RowanW 7y ago
    One of my local bus companies just became the only company to run buses to the local university, after the one other bus company stopped operating in the area. They've removed themselves from archive.org so now we can't easily show that they've more than doubled the cost of the annual student bus pass over the last few years.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    Privacy. Don't want your picture taken all the time? Don't want everything you say recorded and archived? You might also not want everything you write to be archived. If you want control over your content, archives are a problem.
    - vageli 7y ago
      > Privacy. > Don't want your picture taken all the time? Don't want everything you say recorded and archived? You might also not want everything you write to be archived. If you want control over your content, archives are a problem. Good luck tracking down every company/user that has visited your page then. Any single one of them could be archivers. It's not hard to change a user agent to look like Google. This is like arguing against archiving newspapers. If you explicitly publish it online for the world to see, you can't make people unsee it.
      - luckylion 7y ago
        > Good luck tracking down every company/user that has visited your page then. Any single one of them could be archivers. Could be, sure. And anyone could wear a hidden camera and secretly take your picture, or a wire and secretly record you. If any of those undercover archivers re-publishes your content, send a DMCA notice and sue them. Where copyright infringement is a crime, report them. There's a cultural component to this, I believe. Americans seem to feel that pictures, recordings etc taken in public are fair game, continental Europe has a different stance. Even in public, you can't take pictures of ordinary people and publish them (unless they're part of an extraordinary event).
        dkersten 7y ago
        > Americans seem to feel that pictures, recordings etc taken in public are fair game I'm European, but I fail to see how anybody could have any expectation of privacy when in a public place. You either outlaw camera's completely or you have to accept that you might end up in the background of somebodies photograph. I don't think outlawing camera's is realistic.
        luckylion 7y ago
        > You either outlaw camera's completely or you have to accept that you might end up in the background of somebodies photograph. You don't need to outlaw cameras any more than you need to outlaw knives to keep people from stabbing others. But as mentioned, there's a fundamental difference in the idea of privacy, I suppose. It can be understood as "something that happens in a non-public place" or it can be understood as a larger idea that you have a certain right to not be surveilled, recorded and stalked.
        dkersten 7y ago
        My point is that if cameras are not outlawed, then you can be photographed in public by accident, just because you happened to walk into a shot or happened to be in the background when some tourists wanted to photograph something. There's a difference between you can't photograph me while I'm in public and you can't harass me. Its not the act of walking in the same direction and in close proximity to the person that makes following them in public stalking, so you don't need to ban public photography of other people in order to prevent them form being surveilled, recorded and stalked. I guess that I find the idea that you should expect privacy when in a public space kind of strange (its right there in the word: public), but that doesn't mean that I think its ok for someone to follow you around recording you (but not because of the actual act of being recorded, but rather because of the targeted nature). Similarly, I think passive recording (ie non-targeted surveillance) of public spaces should be allowed in and of itself, but that its the use that dictates whether its abusive or not (ie if its done so that people can be identified, then that seems similar to me to following someone around, but if its done for the backdrop of a movie or art project, or its done to study foot traffic on a street.. basically there are many reasons which aren't abusive).
    - cf141q5325 7y ago
      Then dont publish and share your pictures and conversations with everyone. Privacy goes out the window the moment you share stuff with everyone on your own. If you want control over your content you need access control. Its the difference of actually publishing pictures of yourself online instead of being photographed in public. Privacy covers the second not the first.
  - hyperion2010 7y ago
    1. Don't want their lives 'ruined' because of socially unacceptable tweets. 2. Don't want their citizens to know that they are actively committing genocide. 3. Countless other equally legitimate reasons for removing things from the public record. 4. I'm embarrassed. 5. I could loose money. 6. My reputation will be tarnished. 7. I don't want anyone to know that I a into 'x y and z.' 8. I was young and foolish. Some actually legitimate reasons 1. Outed themselves as a minority which is now being persecuted. (too late, the state already has the evidence) 2. Need to remove a post that is actively agitating/acting as a focus point for some group that rises to the level of physical threats. People, the internet is public. If you put up something on port 80 or 443, you have just published a book. You can't unpublish a book. I'm sorry if the affordances are shitty and the social media platforms intentionally mislead you into thinking that publishing is 'sharing,' but if you published it, you have to own it. You cannot unspeak, and if you do you or if a systems allows you to, then that is a fundamental violation of the social contract. If you fucked up, and want to appologise, or provide additional context, then by all means do so. In cases where a tweet, post, etc. incites a brigade, there need to be ways to temporarily hide content, but if it is deleted forever, then there is a tempest in a teapot without any teapot for reference. Not that it will ever happen, but platforms like twitter should be held accountable for facilitating viral hatred and brigading, it would incentivize them to implement algorithms to damp the spread and to force additional context onto users before they are allowed to view a hot and bothered tweet (or similar). You must correctly answer these 10 questions about the context from which the author was speaking before you are allowed to retweet or even view this message. That might be a good compromise for 'surge' internet outrage.
    - rootlocus 7y ago
      > 2. Need to remove a post that is actively agitating/acting as a focus point for some group that rises to the level of physical threats. Mobs have short attention span and are mobilized by the newest controversy of the day. We're talking about recording history. You remove a bug from git, but you don't alter the entire history for it. You remove passwords from git, but you also change the current passwords. There's no reason we can't 'fix' the present and record the past at the same time.
    - icebraining 7y ago
  - onetimemanytime 7y ago
    One example: Made comments as a young man on subjects, now don't agree with them. Or they can cost me the job. Insulted Putin, or China, or MBS and now I need to go to their country
Veen 7y ago
Some people don’t want their site to be part of internet history, and that is a legitimate view.
- cf141q5325 7y ago
  >that is a legitimate view. Why?
  - lifthrasiir 7y ago
    Think about personal correspondences of famous people before the internet.
    - vageli 7y ago
      But if it's online and not gated by login, it's explicitly public, unlike private correspondence.
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        In the UK taking a private copy of a website is a copyright infringement; doesn't matter if you publish it. Your idea probably works in USA with Fair Use.
        ghaff 7y ago
        Fair Use permits the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances and takes into account a number of factors--including the amount of the original work that's used. So quoting a paragraph from a blog post to comment on it is almost certainly OK. An entire website? Probably not under most circumstances.
        vageli 7y ago
        Could you back up this claim? Reading about fair dealing as it is called in UK law [0] leads me to believe otherwise, especially if the copy is used for archival purposes [1]. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_United_Kingdom_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_United_Kingd... [1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/375956/Libraries_Archives_and_Museums.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
mprev 7y ago
This fundamentalism is unhelpful. What if people don’t want to be part of internet history? It’s hard enough to be anonymous, or even to move on from mistakes, as it is.
- shifto 7y ago
  Then why make a site? That's like saying you don't want any photos of you to exist but you've been outside for years while people where making photos and now you're telling them to delete those.
  - mprev 7y ago
    So, what you’re saying is that a decision you make as, say, a 17 year old is one that you must stand by for the rest of your life? And, yes, I get it, there’s more than the IA but it’s a point of principle for me. I’m not talking about erasing newspaper articles but rather the blog a kid posts when they are naive.
    - dkersten 7y ago
      > So, what you’re saying is that a decision you make as, say, a 17 year old is one that you must stand by for the rest of your life? That's basically the way it is anyway. If you go out in public (physically or virtually), you've lost some control over how long-reaching your actions might be. If you do something stupid in public, you can't prevent people from posting their videos/photos of it, or just talking about you. The internet is no different. While you can get your stuff removed from some places, you have no control over it generally speaking. Somebody might have screenshots for example.
      - JeremyBanks 7y ago
        Tempting as it is to reduce everything to a binary, that's not how things work.
      - sasasassy 7y ago
        In most parts of the world you are entitled to privacy even if you are outside, and you can demand photos/videos taken of you without your consent to be deleted. Plus, just because I have a website, that doesn't make it's content open domain, for some business to copy all it's contents and publish them without my knowledge.
dazc 7y ago
Let's say you spend a few years building a site and then things change and you lose interest. You stop paying for hosting and let the domain drop? Then someone catches the domain and recreates the site with your content, without your knowledge or permission. You're happy with this are you?
- vageli 7y ago
  > Let's say you spend a few years building a site and then things change and you lose interest. You stop paying for hosting and let the domain drop? > Then someone catches the domain and recreates the site with your content, without your knowledge or permission. You're happy with this are you? What's to stop someone from doing that without the internet archive?
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > What's to stop someone from doing that without the internet archive? The law?
    - vageli 7y ago
      This is exactly my point.
  - dazc 7y ago
    If the domain has dropped how are they going to find the content?
dredmorbius 7y ago
Though I somewhat sympathize with this view, there can be legitimate reasons for depublication. The Internet is deep and vast. That said, removal may entail simply removing public access, rather than deleting archived content: The Internet Archive may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, remove certain content or disable access to content that appears to infringe the copyright or other intellectual property rights of others. https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004716091-Wayback-Machine-General-Information https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004716091-Wayb...
est31 7y ago
Does the Wayback Machine actually delete the content it removes or does it just not make it available? In 200 years, when everyone involved is dead, there is far more of a case to be made to publish it than now.
- estherv 7y ago
  Very good question.

by maguay 7y ago

onetimemanytime 7y ago

There are MANY reasons to remove sites from there.

gambiting 7y ago
Ok, list a few then please.
- RowanW 7y ago
  One of my local bus companies just became the only company to run buses to the local university, after the one other bus company stopped operating in the area. They've removed themselves from archive.org so now we can't easily show that they've more than doubled the cost of the annual student bus pass over the last few years.
- luckylion 7y ago
  Privacy. Don't want your picture taken all the time? Don't want everything you say recorded and archived? You might also not want everything you write to be archived. If you want control over your content, archives are a problem.
  - vageli 7y ago
    > Privacy. > Don't want your picture taken all the time? Don't want everything you say recorded and archived? You might also not want everything you write to be archived. If you want control over your content, archives are a problem. Good luck tracking down every company/user that has visited your page then. Any single one of them could be archivers. It's not hard to change a user agent to look like Google. This is like arguing against archiving newspapers. If you explicitly publish it online for the world to see, you can't make people unsee it.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      > Good luck tracking down every company/user that has visited your page then. Any single one of them could be archivers. Could be, sure. And anyone could wear a hidden camera and secretly take your picture, or a wire and secretly record you. If any of those undercover archivers re-publishes your content, send a DMCA notice and sue them. Where copyright infringement is a crime, report them. There's a cultural component to this, I believe. Americans seem to feel that pictures, recordings etc taken in public are fair game, continental Europe has a different stance. Even in public, you can't take pictures of ordinary people and publish them (unless they're part of an extraordinary event).
      - dkersten 7y ago
        > Americans seem to feel that pictures, recordings etc taken in public are fair game I'm European, but I fail to see how anybody could have any expectation of privacy when in a public place. You either outlaw camera's completely or you have to accept that you might end up in the background of somebodies photograph. I don't think outlawing camera's is realistic.
        luckylion 7y ago
        > You either outlaw camera's completely or you have to accept that you might end up in the background of somebodies photograph. You don't need to outlaw cameras any more than you need to outlaw knives to keep people from stabbing others. But as mentioned, there's a fundamental difference in the idea of privacy, I suppose. It can be understood as "something that happens in a non-public place" or it can be understood as a larger idea that you have a certain right to not be surveilled, recorded and stalked.
        dkersten 7y ago
        My point is that if cameras are not outlawed, then you can be photographed in public by accident, just because you happened to walk into a shot or happened to be in the background when some tourists wanted to photograph something. There's a difference between you can't photograph me while I'm in public and you can't harass me. Its not the act of walking in the same direction and in close proximity to the person that makes following them in public stalking, so you don't need to ban public photography of other people in order to prevent them form being surveilled, recorded and stalked. I guess that I find the idea that you should expect privacy when in a public space kind of strange (its right there in the word: public), but that doesn't mean that I think its ok for someone to follow you around recording you (but not because of the actual act of being recorded, but rather because of the targeted nature). Similarly, I think passive recording (ie non-targeted surveillance) of public spaces should be allowed in and of itself, but that its the use that dictates whether its abusive or not (ie if its done so that people can be identified, then that seems similar to me to following someone around, but if its done for the backdrop of a movie or art project, or its done to study foot traffic on a street.. basically there are many reasons which aren't abusive).
  - cf141q5325 7y ago
    Then dont publish and share your pictures and conversations with everyone. Privacy goes out the window the moment you share stuff with everyone on your own. If you want control over your content you need access control. Its the difference of actually publishing pictures of yourself online instead of being photographed in public. Privacy covers the second not the first.
- hyperion2010 7y ago
  1. Don't want their lives 'ruined' because of socially unacceptable tweets. 2. Don't want their citizens to know that they are actively committing genocide. 3. Countless other equally legitimate reasons for removing things from the public record. 4. I'm embarrassed. 5. I could loose money. 6. My reputation will be tarnished. 7. I don't want anyone to know that I a into 'x y and z.' 8. I was young and foolish. Some actually legitimate reasons 1. Outed themselves as a minority which is now being persecuted. (too late, the state already has the evidence) 2. Need to remove a post that is actively agitating/acting as a focus point for some group that rises to the level of physical threats. People, the internet is public. If you put up something on port 80 or 443, you have just published a book. You can't unpublish a book. I'm sorry if the affordances are shitty and the social media platforms intentionally mislead you into thinking that publishing is 'sharing,' but if you published it, you have to own it. You cannot unspeak, and if you do you or if a systems allows you to, then that is a fundamental violation of the social contract. If you fucked up, and want to appologise, or provide additional context, then by all means do so. In cases where a tweet, post, etc. incites a brigade, there need to be ways to temporarily hide content, but if it is deleted forever, then there is a tempest in a teapot without any teapot for reference. Not that it will ever happen, but platforms like twitter should be held accountable for facilitating viral hatred and brigading, it would incentivize them to implement algorithms to damp the spread and to force additional context onto users before they are allowed to view a hot and bothered tweet (or similar). You must correctly answer these 10 questions about the context from which the author was speaking before you are allowed to retweet or even view this message. That might be a good compromise for 'surge' internet outrage.
  - rootlocus 7y ago
    > 2. Need to remove a post that is actively agitating/acting as a focus point for some group that rises to the level of physical threats. Mobs have short attention span and are mobilized by the newest controversy of the day. We're talking about recording history. You remove a bug from git, but you don't alter the entire history for it. You remove passwords from git, but you also change the current passwords. There's no reason we can't 'fix' the present and record the past at the same time.
  - icebraining 7y ago
- onetimemanytime 7y ago
  One example: Made comments as a young man on subjects, now don't agree with them. Or they can cost me the job. Insulted Putin, or China, or MBS and now I need to go to their country

Veen 7y ago

Some people don’t want their site to be part of internet history, and that is a legitimate view.

cf141q5325 7y ago
>that is a legitimate view. Why?
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  Think about personal correspondences of famous people before the internet.
  - vageli 7y ago
    But if it's online and not gated by login, it's explicitly public, unlike private correspondence.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      In the UK taking a private copy of a website is a copyright infringement; doesn't matter if you publish it. Your idea probably works in USA with Fair Use.
      - ghaff 7y ago
        Fair Use permits the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances and takes into account a number of factors--including the amount of the original work that's used. So quoting a paragraph from a blog post to comment on it is almost certainly OK. An entire website? Probably not under most circumstances.
      - vageli 7y ago
        Could you back up this claim? Reading about fair dealing as it is called in UK law [0] leads me to believe otherwise, especially if the copy is used for archival purposes [1]. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_United_Kingdom_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_United_Kingd... [1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/375956/Libraries_Archives_and_Museums.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

mprev 7y ago

This fundamentalism is unhelpful. What if people don’t want to be part of internet history? It’s hard enough to be anonymous, or even to move on from mistakes, as it is.

shifto 7y ago
Then why make a site? That's like saying you don't want any photos of you to exist but you've been outside for years while people where making photos and now you're telling them to delete those.
- mprev 7y ago
  So, what you’re saying is that a decision you make as, say, a 17 year old is one that you must stand by for the rest of your life? And, yes, I get it, there’s more than the IA but it’s a point of principle for me. I’m not talking about erasing newspaper articles but rather the blog a kid posts when they are naive.
  - dkersten 7y ago
    > So, what you’re saying is that a decision you make as, say, a 17 year old is one that you must stand by for the rest of your life? That's basically the way it is anyway. If you go out in public (physically or virtually), you've lost some control over how long-reaching your actions might be. If you do something stupid in public, you can't prevent people from posting their videos/photos of it, or just talking about you. The internet is no different. While you can get your stuff removed from some places, you have no control over it generally speaking. Somebody might have screenshots for example.
    - JeremyBanks 7y ago
      Tempting as it is to reduce everything to a binary, that's not how things work.
    - sasasassy 7y ago
      In most parts of the world you are entitled to privacy even if you are outside, and you can demand photos/videos taken of you without your consent to be deleted. Plus, just because I have a website, that doesn't make it's content open domain, for some business to copy all it's contents and publish them without my knowledge.

dazc 7y ago

Let's say you spend a few years building a site and then things change and you lose interest. You stop paying for hosting and let the domain drop? Then someone catches the domain and recreates the site with your content, without your knowledge or permission. You're happy with this are you?

vageli 7y ago
> Let's say you spend a few years building a site and then things change and you lose interest. You stop paying for hosting and let the domain drop? > Then someone catches the domain and recreates the site with your content, without your knowledge or permission. You're happy with this are you? What's to stop someone from doing that without the internet archive?
- luckylion 7y ago
  > What's to stop someone from doing that without the internet archive? The law?
  - vageli 7y ago
    This is exactly my point.
- dazc 7y ago
  If the domain has dropped how are they going to find the content?

dredmorbius 7y ago

Though I somewhat sympathize with this view, there can be legitimate reasons for depublication. The Internet is deep and vast. That said, removal may entail simply removing public access, rather than deleting archived content: The Internet Archive may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, remove certain content or disable access to content that appears to infringe the copyright or other intellectual property rights of others. https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004716091-Wayback-Machine-General-Information https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004716091-Wayb...

est31 7y ago

Does the Wayback Machine actually delete the content it removes or does it just not make it available? In 200 years, when everyone involved is dead, there is far more of a case to be made to publish it than now.

estherv 7y ago
Very good question.